Recent trends in biomedical diagnostics and drug discovery suggest a rapid growth in the use of high speed and high throughput chemical detection, chemical screening, and compound synthesis. Several systems make use of instruments that require large sample volumes, are difficult to transport, and are prohibitively expensive. Efforts are being directed to accelerate drug delivery and therapeutics, contain high health care costs, and provide decentralized biomedical diagnostics, such as diagnostics for point of care, and other future technologies. Such efforts frequently focus on increased miniaturization, integration, and automation of fluid analysis systems.
Fluid analysis systems traditionally use a number of components, including a light source, a wavelength selection system, a sample presentation system, and a detection system to analyze a patient's fluids. However, each of these components sometimes add prohibitive cost to the overall fluid analysis system, thereby limiting the ownership of traditional fluid analysis systems to large clinics and laboratories.